The Good Traitor

by Ryan Quinn

  Bright’s mind had begun to wander again when the door to the room opened slightly, and his assistant, looking rather sheepish in this company, slipped in.

  There was a short list of people for whom Lionel Bright was to be pulled out of any meeting, should they call. James Pollert was not on that list, but that was only because it had never occurred to Bright that the US secretary of state would have any reason to call him. Fortunately, Bright’s administrative assistant had taken the liberty of exercising his common sense and, instead of asking the secretary of state if he wanted to leave a message, broke into the DNI briefing to deliver a Post-it tucked inside a file folder.

  Bright did a slight double take at the note, then excused himself and retreated to his office. James Pollert and Lionel Bright had been stationed together for nine months in Cairo early in their careers and had grown close. But then Pollert went into politics and made a name for himself, and Bright remained anonymous in the trenches, which was his preference.

  Bright hesitated before picking up the phone. Save for comparing notes before congressional briefings on the Hill, it was unusual for their paths to cross on official grounds.

  “Jim, I’m sorry about Greg,” Bright said into the phone, referring to the deceased ambassador. It was the only reason he could think of why Pollert would be calling. “I know you two were—”

  “Have you seen this?” the secretary of state said as soon as he realized Bright was on the line. His tone had more than a little backspin.

  “What?”

  “Are you near a computer? Look at Gnos.is.”

  “Gnos.is? Christ, what now?” Bright said. Gnos.is had of course been the cause of several minor headaches for the agency, but his prevailing take was that the website was given more credit than it was due. Sure, occasionally Gnos.is published something that created a stir, but no more often than established news organizations. Bright was not alone in his bafflement about where Gnos.is obtained sources for stories or how it was funded under such secrecy. It was beginner’s luck that Gnos.is had managed to stay afloat for as long as it had, Bright mused. He gave it no more than another year or two before it wound up buried in the great start-up graveyard in the cloud.

  “It’s not just Gnos.is,” Pollert said, delivering the name of the site like it was a slur. “The Post and Times are picking it up too. But Gnos.is broke the story.”

  Bright was already at his desk. In front of him sat two computers. He reached for the keys of the one designated for unclassified traffic. The other machine beside it was reserved for classified matters, separated from the Internet by an air gap. He opened a browser and selected Gnos.is from the inappropriately named “Favorites” bar.

  “OK, what am I looking at?” As soon as he said it, his eyes tripped over the headline.

  “US SPY AGENCIES TARGET FOREIGN JOURNALISTS,” Secretary Pollert said. “We’re looking at our worst nightmare.”

  Bright grazed over the first paragraph. America’s spying apparatus was targeting journalists who had access to the inner circles of foreign heads of state, including close allies, the article reported. Undercover CIA operatives stationed at US embassies around the world were aiding the NSA in the program, code named TERMITE. The name had been chosen at random by a computer program, a standard practice that prevented the name itself from revealing even the subject of the operation. As it happened, TERMITE was one of those occasional cases where the name seemed serendipitous.

  Fuck, Bright thought. Journalists reported constantly on what they thought were classified operations, but rarely with much specificity. Naming TERMITE was a catastrophic level of specificity. And public knowledge of the program was a nightmare because spying on the leaders of countries considered close allies had been banned by President Obama after Edward Snowden’s leaks revealed the NSA had been listening in on German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone calls.

  “It was my understanding that this would never be a headline,” Pollert said.

  “Your displeasure is noted.”

  “My displeasure. This office hasn’t received this many pissed-off calls from Congress since Benghazi. I didn’t call to vent, Lionel. How is it that they’re publishing this kind of detail? Why can’t we shut them down?”

  Bright ignored these questions because his answer for both was I don’t know. “I wouldn’t fault you for venting, Jim. But you called me on a telephone to ask me about classified operations. There’s nothing I can say.”

  “What am I supposed to tell them?”

  “Who?”

  “Congress. France. Israel. Russia. China. The fucking Vatican.”

  Bright sighed. “This came from Gnos.is, right? No one reads Gnos.is.”

  “I can guarantee you that our counterparts in Britain, Israel, Russia, and China are poring over it right now.”

  “No, I mean that’s what you should tell them. ‘No one reads Gnos.is.’ Tell them that the Post and the Times should be embarrassed for biting on this story. What is Gnos.is? It’s not a legitimate news organization. It doesn’t employ real journalists. It’s been around for what, a year?”

  “That’s not the point. There’s a fucking leak, Lionel. And having this crap in the news makes my job impossible.”

  “Well, I have my own job to do. But if I were you, I’d tell my counterparts overseas that the classified operation Gnos.is describes does not exist. If they want a different answer, they can get it from their own fucking spy agencies. End of conversation.”

  The secretary of state let a beat pass, then he said, “Fuck you, Lionel.” That had been the way they spoke to each other those many years ago in Africa. Good morning, Jimbo. Fuck you, Lionel. Good talk, let’s go find some terror-loving terrorists. In this context, it was an olive branch, a clue to let Bright know that the secretary of state was aware they were all on the same team.

  “Look, you’ve had a hell of a week,” Bright said.

  When Pollert spoke again, his tone was altogether rehabilitated. “What are you learning about that crash?”

  “I’m sure you know more than I do, Mr. Secretary. Last I heard, everyone was waiting to hear all the gory details from the NTSB.”

  “The NTSB will be lucky if they get the Chinese to give them a tour of Tiananmen Square. Our access to the investigation is a joke. The Chinese had nearly forty-eight hours with that wreckage. If there’s anything they don’t want us to find, it’s gone.”

  “It’ll all come out, Jim. It always does.” He’d meant it to signal the end of their conversation, but Pollert wasn’t finished.

  “Lionel. I’m not saying here that I actually believe foul play was involved—”

  “But?”

  “This Gnos.is article specifically mentions Beijing as a key target of the TERMITE operation. And last week Gnos.is called out Hu Lan’s ties to the MSS. What if the ambassador’s plane going down was retaliation?”

  The man needs a vacation, Bright thought. A counselor. Something.

  “I don’t need to tell you that anything’s possible, but assassinating a diplomat hardly serves the interests of the Chinese, and they know it. Let’s give it a little time, huh? Planes don’t just fall out of the sky. There’s a reason it went down, and we’ll all learn it sooner or later.”

  When he hung up, Bright sat alone thinking about what he had to do. There was a leak somewhere—and the exposure of the TERMITE program suggested that it wasn’t coming from the Chinese. The leaker had to be someone with knowledge of the program. The good news was that that narrowed down the list significantly. The bad news was that everyone on that list had a TOP SECRET security clearance, or higher, which meant whoever it was had access to a whole lot more than what had so far appeared on Gnos.is. If the goal was to harm the United States by leaking classified documents to the press, he or she might just be getting started.

  THE VALLEY

  Rafael Bolívar had never once awoken to an alarm in the months he’d lived in the valley. He was up each morning with the birds and often
sat on the dock with coffee until curiosity drove him to his computer to check the overnight developments on Gnos.is. He and his team—“employees” was not a word that did them justice—had relocated to these mountains hastily, and as such Bolívar had underestimated the full range of advantages of the location. He’d been pleasantly surprised to discover that, more than just a private, subpoena-free place, the valley was an ideal setting for thinking deeply and clearly. All the better that this could be done while sitting on a dock thrust out over mirrorlike water at sunrise.

  These had been some of Bolívar’s most productive months, professionally and intellectually, though they were not without the typical burdens of fugitive life. With the launch of Gnos.is, crimes of corporate fraud and income-tax evasion had been alleged, and then dropped—the former dropped because the media corporation claiming to have been defrauded by Bolívar had gone bankrupt under the expense of defending its own criminal activities, and the latter because Gnos.is earned no income. No, thank you, Gnos.is did not wish to file as a nonprofit, they’d stated in their letter to the bewildered IRS. Perhaps there ought to be another designation: “extra-profit,” as in beyond or outside of profit, although that still conceded a position relative to profit, which defeated the purpose. In fact, Gnos.is took no position on profit at all, other than to acknowledge that profit seeking was a uniquely ill-suited mechanism for getting at common truth and personal meaning.

  It was not the tarnish of those past criminal charges that kept Bolívar from venturing out of the valley. The concern now, the reality that glared back at him from the lake and the trees and that mountain—underneath which his computers performed some of the most advanced data mining and aggregation in the history of information—was that more allegations and charges would come. Bolívar had become certain of that, even before Charlie Canyon had delivered the government’s hyperbolic “invitations” to appear before Congress and in the FBI’s interrogation chambers.

  On this morning, however, it appeared there would be no such peaceful lakeside contemplation.

  Bolívar sat up in bed and waited for the thick fog to lift from his mind. The sound that had disturbed him was a relentless string of crisp beeps, not very loud, but persistent enough to dislodge him from sleep. Facts began to come to him. The tone did not originate from his bedside clock, which told him it was 3:24 AM. Instead, both his phone and his tablet were blinking on the nearby desk in a way he’d seen only once before, when J. D. Jones had demonstrated one of the network’s warning systems. But which one? It was certainly not an attempted cyberattack or the detection of a fraudulent source, both of which happened so frequently, and unsuccessfully, that he’d silenced the corresponding alarm tones on his mobile devices. No, this was something else.

  Bolívar slid from the sheets and crossed the room to the flashing tablet. A text bar at the center of its screen declared two related alerts: SOURCE COMPROMISED and STORY COMPROMISED. Bolívar studied these for a moment, unable to remember their precise meanings.

  Just then his phone rang. It was J. D. Jones.

  “This wake you too?” Bolívar asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Any idea what triggered it?”

  “No. This one’s never gone off. It might just be a bug. I’ll go over to the mine and check it out.”

  “I’ll pick you up,” Bolívar said. They’d tested the security of the site enough that he knew Jones didn’t really think it was just a bug. Besides, now he was up; returning to sleep would be impossible.

  Twenty minutes later they were seated at Jones’s console in the chamber buried beneath the mountain. The Gnos.is/fact home page displayed news stories as spheres clumped together in a cloud. High-level algorithms determined the size and placement of each sphere, shifting the spheres’ proximity to others in the cluster as the algorithms constantly digested streams of new data scraped and filtered from the world’s fiber-optic Internet cables. Stories that impacted the lives of large numbers of people were represented by larger spheres, while less consequential events were contained in proportionately smaller spheres.

  The diagnostic warning system pointed them to one of the largest spheres in Gnos.is’s global news cloud—a wide-reaching report about corruption by government leaders in China. Bolívar noticed something immediately, even before Jones tapped the sphere and it unfolded to display the story’s content in full-screen view.

  “This is the same story that reported Hu Lan’s ties to the MSS.”

  “Yes,” Jones said, “but the China story is one of our most complex. It’s massive. That bit about Hu Lan is basically a sidebar.”

  “That’s not how the attorney general sees it,” Bolívar said. He’d eventually flipped through the file Charlie Canyon had delivered.

  Jones chuckled. “The attorney general is just doing his job. And we’re doing ours.”

  Bolívar stared at the screen with renewed seriousness. “The story’s compromised?”

  “According to the alert, yes.”

  “How?” Tension had crept into Bolívar’s tone. He did not need to say aloud that they could not get this wrong. Not a story this big.

  “I’m not sure,” Jones said, opening the infections log, which recorded every instance of an unauthorized user or virus attempting to penetrate Gnos.is’s network. He scanned through the log entries; there were plenty of hits, but none had succeeded. The log revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Jones tapped the screen, returning to the alert. “The system seems to think that a source might have been exposed.”

  The effectiveness of Gnos.is depended upon the absolute protection of anonymous sources. A government official or low-level employee of a corrupt corporation would be compelled to send Gnos.is information only if his or her anonymity was guaranteed. Building on this principle, Jones had programmed security software to monitor the network for potential breaches to source confidentiality. On a handful of occasions, the computer had flagged a source as compromised, only to rule it out as a false positive a few nanoseconds later. The software protecting both the identity of sources and the integrity of the stories to which they contributed had worked flawlessly from the beginning.

  Until now, if this alert was genuine.

  “Hold on,” Jones said, interpreting the information on his display. “It’s not just one source. It looks like three were flagged.”

  “Three sources?”

  “That’s strange.” Jones had been shuffling quickly through the data, working the touch screen with expert swipes, taps, and pinches of his fingers. Suddenly, he stopped.

  “What?” Bolívar followed Jones’s eyes to the screen.

  “It says they’re deceased.”

  “Since when?”

  “All in the past few days. That must be what triggered the alert. I programmed the system to warn us if two or more sources for a story died of unnatural causes within seventy-two hours.”

  “How’d they die?” Bolívar asked, realizing the answer as soon as the question was out.

  Jones shook his head. “Telling us that would compromise their identities.”

  By design, no one—especially not Bolívar or Jones or anyone who worked for Gnos.is—was permitted to learn the precise source of each piece of information that the Gnos.is computers collected and then used to assemble and prioritize the world’s news. This served the central aim of Gnos.is, which was to eliminate human error and bias in reporting.

  “Thousands of sources must have contributed to a story like this. Isn’t it possible that three of them dying is just a coincidence?”

  Jones thought about this. Finally he said, “I could run some statistical models and tell you the probability of that. But that’s all it would be, a statistical probability.” He glanced up to confirm that Bolívar wasn’t interested in abstractions. Then he said what they both were thinking. “We won’t know for certain without looking at the actual circumstances.”

  Bolívar scratched the back of his head, looking up at the story on the big screen f
or a long moment. Finally he said, “Dammit.”

  It was technically possible to get the computer to identify the three sources. They’d designed the system, after all. They knew how to get from it what they wanted. But accessing source-specific information was something Bolívar had hoped he’d never have to do. It was a purity that he wanted to maintain. Did he have a choice now? He stared at Jones’s screen. Compromised. The word seemed a chilly, inadequate label for someone who’d died. If they couldn’t figure out what had happened to the sources, they had no way of knowing whether the China story itself was compromised, or whether the damage was contained or had only just begun. Looking into it further suddenly seemed like the lesser of two evils.

  Jones must have been playing out this scenario in his head too, because he’d stopped working his screens and was leaning back in his chair. After a few moments, he looked up at Bolívar.

  “All right,” Bolívar said. “We better have a look.”

  Bolívar and Jones were the only two people authorized to handle Gnos.is’s cybersecurity or integrity issues at this level, and they each had to enter separate security codes to get the system to violate its principle of absolute source anonymity. Discomfort rose in Bolívar as he typed in his twelve digits from memory. He considered it a flaw that the system was so vulnerable to the actions of two people with pass codes, no matter how trusted and well intentioned those people were. If Gnos.is had been designed to eliminate human error and bias when it came to reporting factual information, clearly it was not yet a perfect system.